


ain’t no sunshine

by Lvslie



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Bananas, Dimension-Hopping Rose, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Important Conversations, Jam, Post-Episode AU: s02e13 Doomsday, Reunion, UA, UST, and
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 22:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10545338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lvslie/pseuds/Lvslie
Summary: “I’m not a hallucination,” she repeated, eyebrows drawn together. “I built a dimension cannon and ripped my way through a rift. I came back.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> (for @timepetalsprompts ‘bed sharing’ trope. originally had a cracky interlude with donna, but sort of got too long (it still exists somewhere, though). fluff. and a little bit of crack and angst.)

He came around slowly; blinked a couple of times and attempted to focus on the mild haze of peachy and yellowish pinks in front of him. His head throbbed dully and persistently, inducing a vague feeling of nausea, which ricocheted upwards to his dizzy head. Feeling inexplicably warm and fuzzy, he let his eyes fall closed. When he opened his mouth, what escaped was a somewhat throaty sigh.

Instantaneously, a voice came drifting.

“Doctor?” 

_(Oh, what a nice voice. What a nice voice.)_

“Donna, d’you know.” He slurred, tongue stiff and clammy in his mouth, “You sound JUS’ like Rose.”

“That’s ‘cos,” the disembodied voice hesitated, “I  _am_  Rose.”

The Doctor blinked again, more doggedly this time.

The warm swarm of colours compiled itself reluctantly into a recognisable shape. There was a Rose—or, more precisely, a Rose’s  _face_ —hovering over his own. The tip of her nose nearly brushed his. She looked a bit worried.

Quite independently from his brain, the Doctor emitted a noncommittal happy noise, “Rose.” 

Rose smiled a hopeful smile, still appearing apprehensive. “Hey. Are you okay?”

_(He quite liked the smile. He’d always liked the smile. A bit too much, some would argue. A bit too fervently, as far as liking human smiles goes.)_

He studied her mutely for a while. Rose held his gaze with the same, vaguely hopeful expression. 

“Well, obviously  _not_ , as I am hallucinating,” he finally managed to say, as matter-of-factly as his very woozy, slow-paced brain would let him. Rose’s eyebrows knitted together and her smile evaporated.

“Oh, no, no,” the Doctor hastened to clarify, dismayed at the loss, “it’s a very nice hallucination. Very nice. Good stuff, as they say. Way to go, hallucination, really—ah crikey, my head. Ow.”

He flinched but quickly offered her an apologetic smile—which Rose did not return. She looked conflicted as he felt her squeeze his right hand in hers.

“I’m not a hallucination,” she revealed.

“… Is exactly what a hallucination would tell me,” the Doctor argued amicably.

Ghost-Rose bit her lip. “Should I pinch you?”

_Oh._

The Doctor— _still highly loopy and very much concussed, he’d later vehemently argue_ —gave her an unabashedly filthy grin.

“Ah, Rose Tyler,” he drawled. “You can do whatever you’d like to me.”

And he lifted his hips off the ground in a smooth little motion.

Even as her cheeks fell straight into the category of violent red, tint-wise, she remained disappointingly serious as she gingerly pinched his hand. 

“Ow,” the Doctor mumbled obediently, his eloquent hips angling back down.  _Well, so much for the fun._ But then a hazy thought occurred to him and he cheerfully ventured, “Have you been holding my hand?”

“Yeah,” Rose said, sounding slightly mollified, “I have.”

“Oh, good.” He smiled lazily and closed his eyes. His head lolled back limply as another wave of nausea overcame him in a slight tremor.  _Concussion, he’d earlier thought? Well, damn right. One hell of a concussion._

“Wha’s happened to me, then?” he asked somewhat incongruously, trying to collect his thoughts, “T’cause the hallucinations, I mean?”

 _(Not very cooperative ones, even_.)

“Well …” her voice seemed to float away marginally—alarmed, he snatched her wrist mid-air and tugged it back. Mercifully compliant, she stilled the traitorous movement.

“I sort of crashed through a rift in time and space and then the room exploded,” she explained. “You were examining the rift at the same time. I think … well, I think one of the bricks knocked you out.”

“Oh,  _darn_  it,” the Doctor said with distaste, eyes still shut in fear of giving in to the increasing vertigo. “Not a very manly injury to acquire, I’m afraid.”

“Not a very ladylike thing to do,” offered Rose sympathetically, and gave his hand another light squeeze, “hammer your way through the walls of reality.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he replied, allowing himself to carefully squint up at her. “I should imagine you looked endearing.”

“Doctor?” Rose’s voice grew strained.

“Yes, Rose?” 

“Can you, uh …  can you tell if your spine’s whole?”

He did a little mental jog and a little internal Time Lord superior biology scan. 

“It is whole, Rose,” he told her.

Another lip-bite. _Didn’t her lips hurt? Maybe they’d do with some kissing? Purely therapeutic._  

He grudgingly brushed the idle thought aside, recalling her deadpan reaction to his earlier suggestion.

But Rose surprised him. “Can I hug you, then?” she asked in a small voice.

By way of response, the Doctor lifted his stiffened arms and smiled woozily. 

And before he could utter a sound, Rose threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around his back and neck.

_(It was … soft. And warm. And Rose-ish. It was a proper hug, a proper … uh, cuddle? Yeah. A cuddle. He hadn’t been cuddled since she oh so very rudely left him.)_

Clumsily, he wrapped himself around her, pointedly ignoring the feeble protests of his bruised ribs, and letting his eyes fall shut.

“Mm,” he purred with content, letting his hand slide down her back. “ _Rose_.”

“Yeah?” she said softly.

And just like that, the very entirety of his Time Lord being went rigid. 

“Rose, I shouldn’t be able to tell the differences in your muscle development and hair length from a hallucination, no matter how … palpable,” he told her with impressive eloquence, voice strained yet not slurring. Not even _close_ to slurring.

The-Rose-or-Perhaps-Not-Really-Rose didn’t reply for quite a while. To the Doctor, the moment stretched indefinitely. The air seemed to acquire density.

“And what does that tell you?” she queried finally, sounding a bit as though he were seven and she was giving him a riddle to solve.

The Doctor—very slowly and with deliberate thoroughness; his long-fingered hands tracing the shapely and promisingly solid contour of Potential Rose, his high-wired brain calculating the chance percentages—withdrew from the hug.

_(He caught her eyes first. This elusive shade of muted honey—with just a tinge of green, just a fleck of gold. Or perhaps they were simply brown, warmly brown, and he’d always had a flair for the baroque when it came to describing her. Her cheekbones and jaw went next, slightly more prominent, cheeks slightly more sunken. Slightly unnerving lack of overt makeup round her eyes and lips. She appeared to be breathing. And appeared to be alive.)_

“I’m not a hallucination,” she repeated, eyebrows drawn together. “I built a dimension cannon and ripped my way through a rift. I came back.”

The words hung pointedly in the newly thickened air.

But the Doctor’s hurting, shackled mind refused to cope. The synapses failed to connect axons, action potentials failed to come through. He stared at her, blankly, feeling utterly confused, as though rewritten onto a blank slate.

After a considerably long moment, Rose licked her lips. “Doctor, are you sure you don’t have a concussion? I’m beginning to worry, cause you’re so …  _quiet_.”

Somehow, the speech and movement capabilities returned before proper brain activity— _he wasn’t not sure how was that even possible, maybe he could blame it on the superior biology as well?_ —providing him with the clumsy movement of lips and, yet again, a very firm grip on her retreating wrist.

_(There was, somewhere underneath leather and skin, a palpable human pulse. Slightly quickened. And it was just … too much.)_

“Nay,” the Doctor uttered absently, “Time Lords don’ get concussions.”

Something in Rose’s face twitched lightly: it could have been a promise of a smile, it could have been something she wanted to say, and he tried to will his brain into working and resurface from this all-encompassing haze of awestruck-ness— _ah, never to use that word again_ —he was immersed in.

_(He should’ve smiled at her. He should’ve blinked, perhaps.)_

He blacked out.

…

He woke up with an overwhelming notion of having dreamed something uncanny and grand, something unresolved and too fleeting to fully recall with all its glory. He blinked slowly, persistently—and his bleary eyes registered the calmly blue ceiling of his room, scattered periodically with Gallifreyan writing. 

Grunting, the Doctor propped himself up on his elbows and peered ahead, trying to compartmentalise and explain the dull ache in his skull and ribs. Before he reached any conclusion at all, somewhere to his left, a small noise caught his attention.

He glanced over his shoulder.

A sleepy exhale drifted out from tousled blonde hair.

His hearts stopped. 

The air caught in his throat—memory slammed into him mercilessly and all at once, with the force of a tow truck.

“Rose.”

She stirred and sat up in the armchair, startled and persistently blinking. She wore a pink T-shirt and black trousers, was somewhat dishevelled. And her eyes: wild and alert before they zoomed in on him and settled into recognition.

Something softened. She blinked once more. Gave him a hesitant smile. 

“Doctor.”

His mind—tremendous, intricate,  _Time Lord_ —was running at full speed, cataloguing optics and impulses, calculating percentages of probability and angles of illusion. 

_(How?)_

“Rose, what … what are you doing here?”

_(Words, and especially the words he had for her: clumsy, insufficient. Lacking. Uncooperative. He was as helpless with them as ever.)_

She shrugged, crossing one outstretched leg with the other and peering at him with hooded eyes. It struck him suddenly that she looked ... exhausted. 

“Couldn’t sleep,” she said finally in a slightly hoarse voice. “Suppose it’s all of the … I mean, so much happened in such little time, I can’t really wrap my head around it yet. I mean, I’m back. It’s happened. It’s … but anyway, I went to the kitchen for something to nibble. Thought I’d check on you, that brick’s hit you proper. And I just couldn’t leave, ‘cos … because … oh, you know. And I guess I—”

“No,” the Doctor interrupted, eyes transfixed on her, “I mean here. I mean—you came back.”

Rose tugged at the hem of her T-shirt. Pursing her lips, she gave him a curt nod.

He tried to convey at least a fraction of the awe that spontaneously coiled within his chest to her, but what came out of his lips was a weak, “How?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure myself,” Rose replied, cautious as to not meet his gaze and still fidgeting. “See, we tried a couple of things at once. I don’t know which one worked. It could’ve been the dimension cannon—this, um, this travel machine, sort of. A device, for dimension jumping without all the tears in the Universe and all that, but, well if we hadn’t found a rift … it might not have worked out at all.”

“But you shouldn’t have been able to come through either way,” he argued, and fancied her flinch a little. “Not through a rift, not through … anything. The walls were sealed off.”

Much to his dismay, Rose’s discomfort seemed to increase tenfold. Her voice sounded brittle, “Yeah, um, well, never was one to listen to such things, was I? Just kept trying—”

“Because I looked, Rose,” the Doctor cut in. He gathered himself ungainly from the bed— _Careful_ , Rose exclaimed, as he wavered, still dizzy—and shuffled closer to crouch in front of the armchair and face her. 

Her lids fluttered as he drew closer, her breath hitched. She worried her lower lip, now blatantly avoiding his gaze. 

“Yeah?” her voice was small.

He tried to explain. “The rift. The only reason we’ve landed here was because of the rift. I wanted to examine it. I was going to see if I could—well, I thought I’d maybe send a message through. But I never thought I’d …” 

“—live to see me butting right back into this Universe?” she muttered, finally meeting his eyes with a faint hint of a smile—he’d forgotten quite how homely the curves of her face felt. 

“Well, look at that. Impossible to get rid of, aren’t I?”

He stared at her, at a loss for what to say. The silence was muffling, frail.

_(He wanted to tell her a million of things—starting off with cheesy catchphrases like ‘fantastic’ and ‘molto bene’ and, quite impulsively so, a rather growly ‘mine’; then branching out into a variety of fondle variations on the intonations of her name, confessions of vastly inappropriate sentiments and affections he’d been cultivating during her absence and—)_

—and there it was, exactly—inappropriate. It had been inappropriate before she’d gone and it was just as inappropriate now that she was back. He swallowed.

She did look thinner, he noted with concern, thinner and more angular. The somewhat happy-go-lucky air that used to surround her was gone, dissipated along with the round softness of her features. There was something strikingly sharp about her weary eyes now—something older—almost intimidating. 

_(Not to him. Not her.)_

“The world is ending, you know,” Rose said at last, very quietly.

A heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Reason, here’s the time for reason and action and—

“ _Later_ ,” he said forcefully.

Rose relaxed visibly, as though she’d been dreading something that she managed to narrowly escape. She reminded him of something—of someone who, in a sense, didn’t exist anymore.

_(He had a sudden and violent urge to hug her— _it had been ages, ages since he’d been allowed to touch Rose Tyler, after all, and the sensation had always been simply exhilarating to him_ —but wasn’t quite able to overcome the hesitance.)_

And while he remained adrift in his heart-achy ponderings, whatever courage had allowed Rose to level her steady gaze with his for almost a minute—dissolved. She ducked her head, newly restless, and tucked her socked foot underneath her. 

He followed the movement with his eyes.

“Anyway, what about that rift?” she asked lightly, almost conversationally—almost like something they’d pick up after two days of separation instead of three excruciatingly closure-lacking years. 

“Donna’s been telling me you’ve gone barmy and it’s only been, like, two days of you locked up in there. S’not like you weren’t holed up in one place before. Never bothered you this much, though.”

_(Donna? Yes, well, he supposed Donna must have still existed. Donna must have met Rose. But Donna—oh, Donna knew: better not to be around just right now. He’d talk to Donna. Later.)_

“Rose, I hate being stuck in one place, that’s domestic. You know that,” he whined, half-seriously.

With just a smidge more of bravado than he’d expect, Rose tut-tutted, “Well, there was this one time in France—”

The Doctor looked up sharply and she instantly trailed off.

_(She was going to mention this now? This?)_

“No, there wasn’t,” he huffed, “and besides, that’s … that’s in the past, Rose.”

One of her impressively shaped eyebrows rocketed high up. He thought he could pick up another, slightly bolder this time, hint of a smirk.   _Ah. So that’s how she wanted to play it._

“My my, and there’s me thinking time’s relative,” she muttered, “guess I was wrong after all.”

“Rose.” Warningly.

“Okay, fine, fine,” she held up her— _small, she had such small hands, he’d forgotten_ —defensively. “Remember that one time the TARDIS’s just plain refused to work, though? And we had to spend like a week on that rock just off the … whatsit island on this planet that was like ninety percent water? And we just sat in the not-fully-functional TARDIS and you weren’t even complaining—”

“Achyelonia. It was Achyelonia. And that was very different, Rose, I’ll have you know.” 

The words tumbled off his tongue quite on their own accord, before his brain had as much as a brief chance at processing their implications. She studied him with vague suspicion, biting her lower lip.

( _He had a deliciously indecent idea of biting it for her. And the idea forked off eagerly, in the depths of his brain, into many a deliciously indecent scenario.)_

“Different how?”

 _It wasn’t a potentially lethal trap-like confined space_ , he could’ve said.  _It didn’t contain an annoyed Donna Noble trying to cover up her guilt by yelling at me,_  he could’ve said.  _I could still hear the TARDIS,_  he could’ve said.

“I had you,” he said.

Silence.

_(What, what in the name of Rassilon, had possessed him to tell her just that.)_

Rose, quite heroically, said nothing. He allowed himself to glance at her after approximately 3.4231 seconds, when—as loathe to admit it as he was—he could no longer physically restrain himself. 

Her lips were pursed, eyes gleaming with … something. Might’ve been amusement. Might’ve been embarrassment. Might’ve been, uh, disgust? Anger? He wasn’t very good at reading emotions. 

( _He’d managed to forget just how lousy he’d been at reading hers in particular.)_

“Oi, what’s that face?” He demanded, defensive.

She was the very epitome of innocence now. “What face?”

“The face you were making just now,” he gestured vaguely in the direction of her— _so clearly kissable, had they always been this kissable?_ —lips and spied the same persistent half-smile lurking somewhere in their left corner. 

Fearing irrevocable distraction, he babbled on, eyes skittering away, “I’ve seen that face before, Rose Tyler. Gamestation, that’s where I’ve seen it. The  _I’m just too good face_. The  _I’m going to do something the Doctor doesn’t want me to do because it’s reckless and puts me at risk_  face. Don’t make that face.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she shot him a glance, “s’just … that was just about the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard from you, you know.”

The Doctor blinked. There was some undefinable anomaly occurring presently in the otherwise predictable pattern of his hearts’ pace; something the mechanics of which he would marvel on later. He felt warm. 

“What, that bit about not getting antsy when stuck with you?” he said, voice choked.

Rose was uneasy again— _Damn, what had he done? How did that even happen? She’d been smiling just a moment earlier and—_

“Well, yeah.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

“Was I really that lousy with telling you sweet things?” he said at last, meekly.

In response, her face— _finally_ —split into a wide grin. And he just about melted. 

“That … that is scandalous,” he lamented. “And, Rose Tyler … you’re in for a treat.”

At that, to his utmost surprise, Rose snorted. “Yeah, right.” 

The Doctor’s brow furrowed. “What?”

“Just s’long as you don’t remember how quickly I wither and die, you mean,” Rose retorted, “and tell me to leave you alone to brood about your high and mighty cursed Time Lord … aloneness. It's a wonder you never came out of the TARDIS at night to … dunno, stare at the horizon from a cliff or whatnot. Or maybe you did, and the human just slept through, eh?”

He remained quite speechless for quite a moment. 

It was an accusation, if thinly veiled, at its finest: sharp and jibe-y and addressing perhaps not the central issue but biting at one of its peripheral edges. He’d forgotten, because of course he would, just how blunt and confrontational Rose could be.

His hearts hammered on with a dull heavy ache as he tried to muster up the courage for a long-due explanation.

And then, with a slight chuckle, Rose shook her head.

“Calm down, you tightwad,” she told him, reaching out ruffle his fringe in a friendly way. “I’m just kidding.”

_(His skin was tingling beneath the tips of her fingers. He knew what was going on; a recognisable process the tricky complexity of which had always eluded him: prolonged exposure to Rose Tyler equates a heightening of reception for various impulses in the Time Lord. All fairly simple, essentially: she did her thing, and he turned … he turned acute. Yes, acute.)_

“It’s not like that,” he insisted, throat tight.

_(He wasn’t entirely sure with whom he was arguing: Rose’s not-entirely-wrong logics or his inner Don Juan.)_

She sniffed— _and oh, even her bloody sniffing was endearing, and he’d have been cursing Donna for the very same thing in a split of second._ “Is so.”

“Is not.”

“Doctor.”

“ _Rose_ ,” he drawled, quirking his left eyebrow at her. 

_(Perhaps a bit indecently.)_

As if on cue, Rose bit her lip once again—

And launched into a swerve of the topic that had him somewhat dizzied.

“Y’know, back in Pete’s world, I used to eat tonnes and tonnes of sandwiches with jam and bananas? Just ‘cos they reminded me of you. Can you imagine that? Me, with bananas?”

He was too enamoured with the glorious piece of information to properly call her out on the clumsy subject-dodge. “… What, really?” 

“Yeah,” she chuckled. “But at some point I had to stop, ‘cos they were making me sick. And I couldn’t help but think—how can you eat that every day? After some time, it gets just revolting.”

The Doctor gasped. “Sick are the words that are leaving your mouth, Rose Tyler!” he exclaimed. “Revolting?”

She cocked her head to one side, pairing the devilish glint in her eyes with some thorough lip-biting. “I forgot you get so cute when you’re appalled.”

The Doctor’s oxytocin levels soared; he had to physically restrain himself from jumping up a notch. “ _Cute_? You think I’m cute?”

Rose’s lips instantly pursed. “Maybe,” she hedged. 

_(Steady on, Time Lothario, keep your pants on.)_

“Hm,” he murmured even so, fearing it’s come out much like a cat’s purr and attempting to stifle a grin. 

And for some reason—undecipherable to him—Rose chose this exact moment to flush. Hotly. And poke him in the chest. “Shut up.”

The Doctor was amazed. Oh, she looked so  _flustered_. He’d forgotten he even was able to make her this flustered. How could he have forgotten? Such a magnificent superpower to have: the ability to make Rose Tyler squirm. 

He smiled triumphantly, leaning just a bit closer as she fixed her eyes on her nails carpet. Oh, he’d missed this. He’d missed feeling like this, flippant and mildly inappropriate and …

“… Doctor, are you sniffling my hair?”

He tensed up.

_(No, Rose, of course not. Whatever gave you the idea? No, I was checking your electromagnetic aura for stray void motes. They can be very bothersome, let me tell you.)_

“Well, it  _does_  smell different,” he snapped.

_(Yes, congratulations. Smooth as a Dalek.)_

Rose’s eyebrows jumped up so much he was surprised they were still attached to her forehead. “You remember how my _hair_ used to smell?” she asked incredulously.

“Now, don’t insult me, Rose,” the Doctor harrumphed. “Teasing’s teasing, but this is a whole other thing. Of course I know how your hair used to smell. I know what was the exact chemical composition of your hair conditioner. Body lotion. Perfume. That ridiculous sticky thing you put on your eyelashes. I know what bath bomb you used on which day. And we can go further than that, I know, with detail, the dating of the hormonal fluctuations of your—”

She was blushing far more fiercely now, looking positively horrified. “Oh my God, you  _shut up_  right now.”

“Your—”

“Shut up!” she repeated firmly. “Blimey, and you’re saying _humans_ get obsessive about each other.”

“I’m not  _obsessive_ ,” he deflected promptly. “I’m—you know perfectly well how sensitive my tactile receptors are, Rose. And … well … superior biology. I’ve got acute senses which get automatically attuned to the people around me, that’s just ... natural.”

“Oh, but of course,” Rose said gravely. “By heavens, how inconsiderate of me. How could I have ever forgotten about the superior biology?”

She bit her lip, staring him straight in the eyes. “Especially ‘cos you’re so sensitive.”

“Oi,” he narrowed his eyes, fighting off a traitorous smile. “Are you taking the mickey—”

Rose gave him a rather filthy grin. “Yes, I’m taking  _all_  the Mickey—”

“Don’t you dare even finish that.”

She snickered again, this time louder. She seemed to have relaxed somewhat since waking up—her eyes were warm, amused and he was  _glad_. 

And then, very innocently, she ventured, “So, what’s the chemical composition of Donna’s body lotion, eh?”

He inhaled sharply. “I don’t—”

She smirked. “But Time Lord senses, remember? Naturally—”

“— _care_.” 

Rose closed her mouth. He noted, with pleasure, the tinge of blush staining her cheeks once again.

“Oh, hm,” she muttered. “Well, if so … well.”

“Stop smirking,” the Doctor told her.

“M’not.”

“That was a smirk.”

Her eyes lit up at once. “No, it wasn’t.”

“You  _smirked_ ,” he insisted.

Rose shook her head resolutely. “No, I didn’t.”

_(And this feeling: warm and tingly. Infinitely content with his share of the Universe at this very moment.)_

“Aw, come on,” he drawled. “All I did was admit—”

“Yes, Doctor?” Rose challenged at once, the new sharpness of her eyes resurfacing in a flare. “What?”

And he felt it, suddenly—just how frantically her heart was hammering in her chest, and how complimentarily his hearts were, too, the timelines vibrating about them, palpable in the tense air. 

_(And the silence, the silence so loud, so full of her hopeful eyes of a colour that he was not well suited to name; so full of her scarce and overpowering existence.)_

“You have jam in the corner of your lips, Rose,” the Doctor said quietly, reaching out to brush it away with the tip of his forefinger. She blinked rapidly, startled. “It’s been … driving me insane.”

He realised the double entendre a split of second too late, as something in her expression changed.

“Oh, has it?” she muttered coyly, tilting her head once again. “Fancy that. Guess I’ll just … take care of it.”

And she licked her lips, thoroughly and deliberately, staring, yet again, straight into his eyes.

_(He felt like he was about to asphyxiate simply by trying not to gasp.)_

Instead, he managed to brace himself. “Admit,” he blurted, “that I  _missed_  you. A lot.”

All of her flippant seductiveness melted off in an instant. “Yeah?”

“Yes.”

She exhaled shakily, fingers tightening around the cuff of his shirt. “It’s a ... good thing I’m not going anywhere, then.”

“No?” he ventured quietly.

Something in her face twitched and before he could even register it, she was lunging forward. 

He melted into the hug instinctively, his lanky limbs and wiry frame enveloping Rose’s softer and smaller one, gathering her up into him with much force. 

_(He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this giddy: jacket-less, with a purple bruise on his temple, hugging Rose, having survived an unplanned regenerative coma. And not even hallucinating.)_

He angled them upwards and made a step backwards, in order to manoeuvre them in the kitchen’s direction— _where they could have a proper celebratory midnight snack, with much better jam than bloody Pete’s, and bananas and maybe even Easter eggs, that’s right, take that, you stupid parallel universe_ —but miscalculated rather spectacularly.

Stumbling, and quite thoroughly wrapped in Rose, he tumbled backwards onto the circular bed.

In the silence that followed, the Doctor became acutely aware of every frantic beat their three hearts jointly made—resonating in the air, along with exquisitely prominent, rather dizzying vertigo of unmistakably mingled pheromones. 

_Ah._

Rose, he felt, was very tense now; tangled up in the Doctor and clearly confused. Her breath tickled the skin of his neck in a warm exhale, and a very tempting shiver travelled down his spine.

Her voice was somewhat muffled. “Doctor, did you just throw me onto your bed?” 

_(Oh, heavens have mercy on him.)_

“Yes, but by  _accident_ ,” he managed to choke out. There came another silence—Roses muscles seemed to relax a notch and she made a vague attempt at disentangling herself from him.

“Oh,” she acknowledged simply, if slightly dejectedly, and he tried to deduce all of the implications contained in this little _oh_ , but he couldn’t think straight—

he couldn’t search her face without letting her go, but he _really_ couldn’t let her go—

he couldn’t think of a graceful way of getting out of this without _wanting_ to get out in the first place, and he couldn’t—

_(Could he?)_

“By accident—I uh, I stumbled, Rose, we must have fallen backwards—a vastly different direction that intended, but, ah, quite telling, because …” he found himself speaking, words rushed and a little delirious; holding on and not allowing her the easy escape from embarrassment, as he kept them locked tight within the epinephrine-drenched, possibility-spiked couple of seconds.

“There’s this … thing, that happens sometimes, inevitable, really, it’s—a  _projection of the unconscious_ , it’s called. You think of something, or maybe you don’t because you’re not supposed to, you’re really not supposed to. Really not, you get that, Rose? But ah, but your nerves and reflex know better. You know better, somewhere, deep under your own thoughts. And it just … somehow happens.”

_(Yes, that’s just supremely clear and coherent.)_

She was very silent for a moment but he felt her right hand fist in the material of his shirt right between his hearts. “What are you trying to say?”

He swallowed audibly. “You tell me, Rose Tyler.”

She instantly grew strained, “No, Doctor, we’re not doing this. I’m not doing this. You can’t expect me to just guess and then worry—”

“—it’s an easy guess, though,” he countered. Her hair was splayed all over his neck and shoulders, warmth trickling into the stagnant cool of his bloodstream, heating up something buried and hidden. “And you’re very good at guessing.”

He finally let go of her, and she propelled herself on her arms to face him. Her pupils were dilated, breaths coming out shallow and quick through her nose, cheeks flushed—but she was focused, serious as she assessed his uncannily open expression.

Slowly, very slowly, she lifted one hand and pressed two trembling fingers to his neck.

“Your pulse is quickened,” she said hoarsely.

“Well … a double heart means a double …” he began, but she shook her head, firmly.

“No.” Voice steady, achingly young and familiar. “I _know_ your pulse.”

It was such a simple statement, really— _and not like he could not reciprocate, because he knew her pulse as well, he’d learned it and kept, guiltily, as a somewhat forbidden constant_ —but it rendered him utterly still. 

_(Simple but powerful, a like this flimsy relation they’ve been so utterly careful as to leave unlabelled, unscathed and untainted by requirements._ _Something of in the way of belonging, he knew: something inexplicable, something perhaps wrong, something unique and very thrilling in the inability to be understood by anyone else, not with the lingering touches and unsaid words, unbridgeable differences and homely half-smiles; not with the drowsy sideways glances out of the need for reassurance._

_A mutually unspoken acceptance—even as it meant to accept the unknowable.)_

He kissed her.

“Mhh,” Rose let out a surprised little noise, evidently on board as she instantly leaned into him, hands tangling into his hair.

He wasn’t supposed to. She wasn’t supposed to. And neither of them had really explained anything to the other.

_(Later. Definitely later.)_

“Mm,” Rose repeated, trying to move her lips under the steady persistence of his—he’d somehow managed to flip them over glibly and crawl up over her, pushing her into the mattress of his— _comfy, very comfy, high quality Gallifreyan_ —bed, as she tried to angle her hips upwards, “I bloody can’t _believe it_ ,” she muttered and the unexpected and quite sweet-sounding profanity made him stare at her expectantly.

She was delightfully flushed and rumpled and saying, in a vaguely accusatory voice, “Thought you’re never gonna get down to it. For all the staring you do, you’ve really got impressive self-control.”

_(In the end, it was better than a hallucination—more so, even better than his dreams._

_And oh boy, was he good at the dreams.)_

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't slept in a month. i would love to give you all cookies.


End file.
